EMC May Have Invested In MongoDB To Boost Its Storage, Security And Big Data Biz

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EMC appears to be a silent investor in MongoDB, giving the storage giant not only an in on database technology for big data but also a way to significantly improve the performance of its RSA security and Isilon storage technology.

EMC's investment, first reported by Bloomberg and the Boston Business Journal, appears to have been a slip of the tongue on MongoDB's part given that EMC has a policy of not talking about its investments unless an acquisition of a material nature is unveiled.

MongoDB on Friday said it had closed a round of funding that brought it $150 million, referring to it in a statement as the "largest single funding round for any database vendor, NoSQL or otherwise." That round brought total investment in the company to $207 million, the company said.

However, Bloomberg Friday quoted unnamed sources close to MongoDB as saying EMC was an investor.

Both MongoDB and EMC declined to talk about the potential investment. An EMC spokesperson emailed CRN to say that the company does not disclose the contents of its portfolio, while a MongoDB spokesperson said via email that that company cannot comment "at this time" on EMC.

The EMC investment in MongoDB is exciting on a number of fronts, said Jamie Shepard, regional vice president at Lumenate, a Dallas-based solution provider and partner with EMC on the storage and security business.

"This is an exciting year for EMC," Shepard said. "EMC is investing in emerging technologies. Wildly emerging technologies."

MongoDB is a NoSQL database featuring high-performance queries and the ability to work with object data, Shepard said. "Object data is where EMC's ViPR is going," he said.

MongoDB's NoSQL database technology also leverages the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data interchange format to give it an index insertion rate six times that of Oracle and over double that of Microsoft's SQL Server, Shepard said.